Jess Goodell
enlisted in the Marines immediately after she graduated from high school
in 2001. She volunteered three years later to serve in the Marine
Corps' first officially declared Mortuary Affairs unit, at Camp Al
Taqaddum in Iraq. Her job, for eight months, was to collect and catalog
the bodies and personal effects of dead Marines. She put the remains of
young Marines in body bags and placed the bags in metal boxes. Before
being shipped to Dover Air Force Base, the boxes were stored, often for
days, in a refrigerated unit known as a "reefer." The work she did was
called "processing."

"We went through
everything," she said when I reached her by phone in Buffalo, N.Y.,
where she is about to become a student in a Ph.D. program in counseling
at the University of Buffalo. "We would get everything that the body had
on it when the Marine died. Everyone had a copy of The Rules of
Engagement in their left breast pocket. You found notes that people had
written to each other. You found lists. Lists were common, the things
they wanted to do when they got home or food they wanted to eat. The
most difficult was pictures. Everyone had a picture of their wife or
their kids or their family. And then you had the younger kids who might
be 18 years old and they had prom pictures or pictures next to what I
imagine were their first cars. Everyone had a spoon in their flak
jacket. There were pens and trash and wrappers and MRE food. All of it would get sent back [to the Marines' homes].

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"We all had the
idea that at any point this could be us on the table," she said. "I
think Marines thought that we went over there to die. And so people
wrote letters saying 'If I die I want you to know I love you.' 'I want
my car to go to my younger brother.' Things like that. They carried
those letters on their bodies. We had a Marine that we processed and
going through his wallet he had a picture of a sonogram of a fetus his
wife had sent him. And a lot of Marines had tattooed their vital
information under an armpit. It was called a meat tag."

The unit
processed about half a dozen suicides. The suicide notes, she said,
almost always cited hazing. Women, she said, were constantly harassed,
especially sexually, but it often did not match the systematic
punishment and humiliation meted out to men who were deemed to be
inadequate Marines. She said that Marines who were overweight or unable
to do the physical training were subjected to withering verbal and
physical abuse. They were called "fat nasties" and "sh*t bags." The
harassed Marines would be assigned to other individual Marines and
became their slaves. They would be sent on punishing runs in which many
of them vomited. They would be forced to bear-crawl -- walk on all
fours -- the length of a football field and back. This would be followed by
sets of monkey f*ckers -- bending down, grabbing the ankles, crouching
down like a baseball catcher and then standing up again -- followed by a
series of other exercises that went on until the Marines collapsed.

"They make these
Marines do what they call 'b*tch' work," Goodell said. "They are
assigned to be someone else's 'b*tch' for the day. We had a guy in our
platoon, not in Iraq but in California, and he was overweight. He was on
remedial PT, which meant he went to extra physical training. When he
came to work he was rotated. One day he was with this corporal or this
sergeant. One day he was sent to me. I had him for an hour. I remember
sending him outside and making him carry things. It was very common for
them to dig a hole and fill it back up with sand or carry sandbags up to
the top of a hill and then carry them down again."

The unit was sent
to collect the bodies of the Marines who killed themselves, usually by
putting rifles under their chins and pulling the trigger.

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"We had a Marine
who was in a port-a-john when he blew his face off," she said. "We had
another Marine who shot himself through the neck. Often they would do it
in the corner of a bunker or an abandoned building. We had a couple
that did it in port-a-johns. We had to go in and peel and pull off
chunks of flesh and brain tissue that had sprayed the walls. Those were
the most frustrating bodies to get. On those bodies we were also on
cleanup crew. It was gross. We sent the suicide notes home with the
bodies.

"We had the
paperwork to do fingerprinting, but we started getting bodies in which
there weren't any hands or we would get bodies that were just meat,"
said Goodell, who in May will publish a memoir called "Shade It Black:
Death and After in Iraq." The book title refers to the form that
required those in the mortuary unit to shade in black the body parts
that were missing from a corpse. "Very quickly it became irrelevant to
have a fingerprinting page to fill out. By the time we would get a body
it might have been a while and rigor mortis had already set in. Their
hands were usually clenched as if they were still holding their rifle.
We could not unbend the fingers easily."

The
unit was also sent to collect Marines killed by improvised explosive
devices (IEDs). The members would arrive on the scene and don white
plastic suits, gloves and face masks.

"One of the first
convoys we went to was one where the Army had been traveling over a
bridge and an IED had exploded," she said. "It had literally shot a
seven-ton truck over the side and down into a ravine. Marines were
already going down into the ravine. We were just getting out of our
vehicles. We were putting on our gloves and putting coverings over our
boots. I was with a Marine named Pineda. I was coming around the Humvee
and there was a spot on the ground that was a circle. I looked at it and
thought something must have exploded here or near here. I went over to
look at it. I looked in and saw a boot. Then I noticed the boot had a
foot in it. I almost lost my lunch.

"In the seven-ton
truck the [body of the] assistant driver, who was in the passenger
seat, was trapped in the vehicle," she said. "All of his body was in the
vehicle. We had to crawl in there to get it out. It was charred. Pineda
and I pulled the burnt upper torso from the truck. Then we removed a
leg. Some of the remains had to be scooped up by putting out hands
together as though we were cupping water. That was very common. A lot of
the deaths were from IEDs or explosions. You might have an upper torso
but you need to scoop the rest of the remains into a body bag. It was
very common to have body bags that when you picked them up they would
sink in the middle because they were filled with flesh. The contents did
not resemble a human body."

The members of
the mortuary unit were shunned by the other Marines. The stench of dead
flesh clung to their uniforms, hair, skin and fingers. Two members of
the mortuary unit began to disintegrate psychologically. One began to
take a box of Nyquil tablets every day and drink large quantities of
cold medicine. He was eventually medevaced out of Iraq.

"Our cammies
would be stained with blood or with brains," she said. "When you scoop
up the meat it often would get on the cuffs of our shirts. You could
smell it, even after you took off your gloves. We weren't washing our
cammies every day. Your cuff comes to your face when you eat. Physically
we were stained with remains. We had a constant smell like rotten meat,
which I guess is what it was since often the bodies had been in the sun
and the heat for a long time. The flesh had gone bad. The skin on a body
in the hot sun slides off. The skin detaches itself from the layer
beneath and slides around on itself.

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"Our platoon was
to the Marines what the Marines are to much of America: We did things
that had to be done but that no one wanted to know about," she said.
"The other Marines knew what we did, but they did not want to think it
could happen to them. I had one female Marine in my tent who would talk
to me. The rest would not give me the time of day. The Marines in
Mortuary Affairs knew that any day could be our day. Other Marines, who
have to go out on the convoys, who have to get up the next day, have to
get on with life."

Her unit once had
to recover two Marines who had drowned in a lake. It appeared one had
leapt in to save the other. The bodies, which were recovered after a
couple of days by Navy divers, were grotesquely swollen. One of the
Marines was so bloated and misshapened that the body was difficult to
carry on a litter.

"His neck was as
wide as his bloated head, and his stomach jutted out like a barrel," she
writes in the book. "His testicles were the size of cantaloupes. His
face was white and puffy and thick. Not fat, but thick. It was unreal.
He looked like a movie prop, with thick, gray, waxy skin and the thick
purple lips. We couldn't stop looking at these bodies because they were
so out of proportion and so disfigured and because, still, they looked
like us."

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.